THE Shroud of Turin is a four and a half metre long, one metre wide linen cloth bearing the front and back image of a scourged, crucified man.
Since it appeared in 1578, many believers have venerated the Shroud as the burial cloth of Jesus Christ. It has also been the subject of scrutiny by sceptics.
The Holy See, which has had custody of the Shroud since 1983, has never taken a definitive stance on the Shroud’s authenticity but many popes have visited it and attested to its devotional power.
Former journalist and Sydney Catholic William West, who spent nearly 20 years at The Australian and has been founding editor of multiple publications, weighed into the debate with his book, Riddles of the Shroud – Questions Science Can’t Answer.
He began his research with an open mind and found that the more he researched, the more his opinion swung from believer to sceptic to believer again.
“My wife is an English teacher and she said she wanted to write an article about watching me change course all the time,” he said with a laugh.
“One day I would say, ‘This is just amazing’, and then the next day, ‘Oh gee, I stumbled on this fact and it looks a bit unlikely now’.”
Going into it, he thought the best story would be to show the Shroud was a fake but over time he was drawn to a single conclusion – “Given the evidence, I can’t think what else it could be” other than the burial cloth of Jesus.
Mr West’s journey into the Shroud began with a popular documentary The Silent Witness, which presented evidence pointing towards the authenticity of the cloth as the true burial cloth of Jesus.
He found the documentary convincing but like many believers, had his belief dashed when he learned about the 1988 radiocarbon tests that dated the Shroud to the 1300s.
This year, a new type of X-Ray dating was used on the Shroud by a team working out of Italy’s Institute of Crystallography at the country’s National Research Council.
The cutting-edge technology dated the Shroud to the time and place of the crucifixion of Jesus detailed in the Gospels. The examined extract of cloth came from the same area of the Shroud where the 1988 radiocarbon tests were performed.
For Mr West, the most perplexing part about the Shroud was the image of the crucified man.
“No one can explain it,” he said.
Despite many attempts at reproducing the image from organisations as well-resourced as the British Museum, Mr West said no one had ever reproduced a convincing replica.
“The most intriguing fact about the Shroud is that, from what we now know, the only possible explanation for the impossible image on the cloth is that it is a miracle.”
The book points to many questions about the Shroud that no one has been able to answer despite more than a century of scientific research.
“Blood chemistry and other forensic details indicate that the man on the cloth is real, that the wounds are real, and the blood is real,” he said.
“And then there is the well-known fact that the Shroud image has been shown by modern technology to be a photo-like, high-resolution, three-dimensional, negative image – something that can’t be done today, let alone in the Middle Ages.
“The simple fact is that no medieval forger could have conceived all the impossible features of the Shroud, let alone have created them.
“The evidence that exists now includes four different scientific dating tests carried out in recent years establishing that the Shroud is from the first century.
“It is a profound puzzle.
“It cannot be explained without accepting that some kind of miracle was involved. As Shroud researchers like to say: ‘If God made the Shroud, it was a small miracle. If a human being did it, it was an incredible miracle.’”
Riddles of the Shroud is available through amazon.com.au as a soft-cover book and as a Kindle e-book and will soon be released as an audiobook on Audible.
